Event based transcription system for polyphonic piano music

Music transcription consists in transforming the musical content of audio data into a symbolic representation. The objective of this study is to investigate a transcription system for polyphonic piano, triggered by events corresponding to the played notes. The proposed method focuses on note events and their main characteristics: the attack instant, the pitch and the final instant. Onset detection exploits a binary time-frequency representation of the audio signal. Note classification and offset detection are based on constant Q transform (CQT) and support vector machines (SVMs). We present a collection of experiments using synthesized MIDI files and piano recordings. and compare the results with existing approaches. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.